High Noon with Glenn Frankel

Tonight we look at a classic western film High Noon and the Hollywood Black list. The question remains: how did a movie of such celebrated Hollywood legend, actually get made when its writer Carl Foreman was being persecuted with a systematic Hollywood industry and US government backed juggernaut out to destroy people's reputations, preventing them from working and ultimately destroying their lives. How did writer Carl Foreman persevere through such a dark draconian witch hunt? Foreman would soon be completely isolated and thrown under the bus from his loyal friends, all in a attempt to save their own hides.

During the 30s and through to the end of the war in 1945, German citizens would willing give up the names and families, even children, of Jews to Hitler's Gestapo again all in order to save their own hides. The holocaust only having ended in 1945, and the Black Lists beginning only two years later in 1947, you would think that the bastion of freedom, the United Sates would be impregnable from such hysteria, but that was not the case then, nor is it the case now as we have simply exchanged the term "communists" to "Muslims".

Our guest tonight, Glenn Frankel and author of High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic may just offer us an answer.

GLENN FRANKEL - Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller. He was director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin & a visiting professor at Stanford University. He has been a Washington Post reporter, editor and bureau chief in London, Southern Africa & Jerusalem. His books include:

• The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend
• Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel
• Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa
•High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic

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